The end of capitalism has begun

Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian

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Welcome to an age of sharing. Illustration by Joe Magee

Paul Mason

@paulmasonnews

Friday 17 July 2015 11.00 BST Last modified 12 August 201507.52 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.

Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.

Watch: Capitalism is failing, and it’s time to panic

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.

You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.

Sharing the fruits of our labour. Illustration by Joe Magee

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself.

I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”

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The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart.

The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold.

Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up.

Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.

Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.

That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.

The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re?employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet.

As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.

Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.

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We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet.

Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.

Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? Illustration by Joe Magee

But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world.

The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive” capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist.

During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.”

You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results.

If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.

Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too.

For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”.

There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx.

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The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”.

In the “Fragment” Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines.

Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”.

In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched.

Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.

In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”.

Marx imagined something close to our information economy. He wrote its existence would blow capitalism sky high

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With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost.

But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening.

Networks restore “granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar.

The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels.

Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.”

Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”.

Manuel Castells: how modern political movements straddle urban space and cyberspace

True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country.

By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.

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This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I’m concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the “big boys” of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity.

Information wants to be free. Illustration by Joe Magee

In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of “networks you can’t default on” – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant.

So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like.

I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it.

For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious “economic” thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built.

Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self.

The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).

Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution. Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas.

A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it.

Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs.

The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating.

The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold.

The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term. They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society.

Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero.

Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and “despite” capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on.

If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.

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The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.

As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models.

The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.

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Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom?

It is the elites, cut off in their dark-limo world, whose project looks forlorn

It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.

All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as The Road or Elysium. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?

Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true.

We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it.

Postcapitalism is published by Allen Lane on 30 July. Paul Mason will be asking whether capitalism has had its day at a sold-out Guardian Live event on 22 July. Let us know your thoughts beforehand at theguardian.com/membership.

Postcapitalism by Paul Mason (Allen Lane, ?16.99). To order a copy for ?12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over ?10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of ?1.99.

"To produce people's control over information, you have to have extremely well-informed and well-educated people, motivated by something more than their own isolated or tribal immediate gratification."

Like Julian Assange you mean?

I agree, most of the comments above state clearly that lots of people read the article so superficially and instantly felt compelled to rewrite-it in their comments almost as long as Mason's without even reflecting at it one moment longer
You don't sound "uneducated, mindless, self-gratifying, isolated narcissists, overwhelmed by corporate-managed information who, when not simply pressing buttons for gratification, take out the failure of videogames and the like to gratify them on others by committing random acts of self-immortalizing violence" so are you sure this is what is happening...? :)
Because during the Crusades the people you describe existed already (minus the buttons and the videogames).

Urgelt

20 Jul 2015 05:24

A comment cannot be an article, so with that restriction understood, I'll try to keep my remarks relatively brief.

The author misses a few very important points.

1. Information can be fenced, and it is being fenced. While this fencing runs counter to a human impulse to share ideas freely, it can be enforced. With guns. And it is being enforced. With guns. In other words, we see not only wealth concentration, but rising information concentration and control, as with increasingly draconian intellectual property regimes and enforcement, national security apparatuses, and criminalizing the possession of information which 'authorities' may possess, but not citizens. Did I mention that the defenders of the status quo have guns? Big ones.

2. Endlessly rising productivity due to advancing technology is driving wealth concentration on a scale never before seen. Jobs, the primary mechanism under capitalism for distributing wealth downward, are increasingly impotent to perform that task - because every year it takes fewer people to do the work required to keep civilization going. The number of people who are 'excess to capitalism's requirements' is rising, and they are being shoved out onto the margins. No-one has proposed a path towards replacing jobs as a mechanism for downward wealth distribution. The world's economists are notoriously silent on this subject, which is perhaps understandable when you realize that most of them are serving the 1%'s ongoing wealth concentration; that's their day job. Speaking vaguely of Wikipedia and cooperative kindergartens and cryptocurrencies does not identify a replacement mechanism for downward wealth distribution.

3. The world population is being radicalized, both in response to overpopulation and in response to wealth concentration (and the increasingly vigorous defense of wealth concentration). The result is growing instability. The trend is uneven, but it is proceeding nearly everywhere. Refugee populations are surging, with no end in sight. Both the defenders of the status quo and radicals are becoming more brutal.

4. The richest among us are consolidating their grips on governments wherever they can to serve their interests. It's really quite pointless to speak of governments acting to encourage the free exchange of information; they are coming down hard on the side of curbing information availability, restricting it to the wealthy and their global security servants.

5. The author thinks the sharing economy will quietly supercede capitalism. That isn't how I see this playing out. Instead, capitalism will shrink as demand is concentrated where the wealth is. We already have enclaves for the wealthy. Soon they will be 'retreats.' 'Fortresses.' The have-nots will be treated with increasing brutality by those protecting their fenced preserves of information and wealth.

6. The worst mistake the author makes is in failing to see how these trends will lead us to inconceivable violence. Endlessly rising productivity, concentration of wealth and increasing radicalization and brutality will shake the stability of our entire civilization. It's not obvious that it will not fall.

7. The last mistake the author makes is in defining a too-rigid equation between information and resources. Factually, resources do have limits, no matter what you know. For example, marine biologists are predicting that by 2050, give or take a few years, there will no longer be any commercially significant populations of edible fish in the world's oceans. A few decades further on, we'll have harvested all edible biomass; all that will be left are inedible species like jellyfish. Species extinctions on land are rising, too, also posing problems for ecosystem productivity and human food production. No information-sharing scheme can put a halt to this advancing resource crunch. Combined with rising population, rising wealth concentration, rising radicalization and brutality, we're in big, big trouble, and I haven't even mentioned what climate change will do to us. Starting up a free kindergarten makes not even a tiny dent in that problem.

Conclusion: at this juncture in human history, it's ridiculous to be talking about utopian visions. We should instead be talking about preventing a Malthusian die-back.

schauffler NadiaJohanisova 20 Jul 2015 10:32

This is an excellent response to what looks like, unfortunately, another boosterish celebration of the "liberating" qualities of a technological regime which is produced by, and dependent upon, the most aggressive, concentrated and uncontrollable form of capitalism pure and simple. The endless iteration of the word "information", as if this denoted something uniform, powerful, desirable or even identifiable, suggests that the author has only a sketchy idea even of his own theory, nor does he deign to discuss -- in the excerpt printed above -- the mechanics of the concentration of capital and the dynamics of perpetual accumulation. As Ms. Johanisova rightly points out, there is no mention made of the gigantic forces manifest in the production and distribution of our information networks and the (ever-increasing) amounts of energy they require to be sustained. Nor are we given any clear idea how "information" will liberate us from dependence on these forces. Does the author think that Samsung, Exxonmobil, Unilever, Maersk Sealand and Koch Industries will somehow be replaced by global co-ops that eschew profit?

NadiaJohanisova 20 Jul 2015 09:44

I would agree with the main thrust of the argument: that one way out of the current system (or part of it) is via localised and democratically governed systems of mutual support, services and production. I like some of the insights (eg austerity as the first step of the race to the bottom)and feel close to the general values espoused b the author. But I am worried about the authors´s linear Eurocentric evolutionary model of the world, his over-emphasis on technology as driving this change,his naive view of information technology as costless and without power-imbalances and most of all his ignorance of environmental aspects and dimensions of what he discusses.
"Postcapitalism" - Paul Mason should perhaps acknowledge that he has not coined this term (see eg the book JK Gibson-Graham: A post capitalist politics.).
"The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above." The article is Northern-Europe-centered. As far as I know the revolutionary ideals are still very much alive in may parts of the worls incl. Southern Europe. Also, it is I think counter-productive to delete government policies from the equation of whatever needs to be done to reach sustainable and equitable societies. The capitalist machine, the growth imperative,the race to the bottom will not go away if we stick our hands in the sand. Nb. Nationalising banks does not = destruction of market.
"Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all". I am not sure of this. It has changed the character of work, contributed to the race to the bottom and while many are unemployed, many are working harder than ever du to the growing power of capital to relocate and thus weaken any legislation . The relationship between work and wages has always been loose (as eg Petr Jehlička has been pointing out in his papers). The idea that we will need no more work is based on not integrating environmental issues into the picture. Like André Gorz in the 1970s, the author does not realise that automation is built on fossil fuels, with all the accompanying problems (global warming, oil peak, imbalance between losers and winners of the race for the last fossil fuels remaining (Alaska, Amazonia...fracking...). Even information technology rests on high energy consumption and large electronic servers made from "stuff".
"The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free." But it does not operate for free, it is supported by volunteer donations. The problem also is that these volunteers are still dependent on jobs in presumably capitalist enterprises. This is why it is so important for the new "commons" and "peer production" to link up with the old "cooperative movement" to create real livelihoods for these people. I have an interesting report on this from a conference in 2014 where they actually did try to link up.
"Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too....We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever." I am worried that this is the old Western economic sin of discounting the "material" again: old wine in new bottles. Information can reproduce indefinitely, true. But all clicking on the internet, all playing of tunes via computer etc. has a material/energy cost: production costs of producing the computers, i-pads, mobiles etc. plus the giant servers, energy costs of operating them, cost to the earth of the waste. Tin, tungstam, tantalum for mobiles are mined forcibly by near-slaves in Easten Congo in militia-held territory, illustrating a wider and deeper issue of North-South imbalance.
"There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs." This cannot be done - and thought - "in parallell": Unfortunately (because it is so difficult), the task is to synthesise our insights from all these spheres of we want to build a credible utopia. Environmental issues and "trashing the earth" cannot be relegated to a footnote.

climbertrev1 Bluecloud 20 Jul 2015 07:36

My first suggestion would be a basic income for everyone.

By everyone do you mean world wide? I will just give one case example to show you that this could be a very substantial challenge.
In Thailand the minimum wage is about 6 pounds a day for those employed in the formal sector. Most Thais work in the informal sector so are not eligible for this bonanza. Even in the formal sector most Thais do not get sick pay, and will not get any form of state pension. Most Thais recieve minimal health care and education.
Of course things are even worse in Burma, Cambodia and Laos. Which is why they flock to Thailand for employment on building sites and farm labouring day rates are between 2 to 4 pounds a day.
As far as the article goes it ignores one fundamental area. That area is corruption and patronage. In Thailand police officers, government workers, teachers paid poorly perhaps 300 -500 pounds a month can afford to run expensive cars and live in large houses. How come? The answer is corruption. It is a fact of life in Thailand that officials are corrupt. Any public works contract is reckoned to cost 20-40% more than it should because of all the skimming off that takes place.
Thailand has more admirals than it has ships. It probably has more generals than it does tanks. Why is that? Patronage pure and simple.

Arthur Robey Harry Callahan 20 Jul 2015 06:55

Thank you for your reply Harry, your position is becoming clearer to me.
I am of the opinion that there can never be enough per capita wealth. If we drive this argument to extremes then everyone born will have everything they want and never have to lift a finger. What then the wonders of Calvinistic industry?

I see that you expound the virtues of the lessons of history. But that is precisely what is being argued against. Our predicament has no precedent. History can teach us nothing about the way forward from here. Life sets the exam and then produces the lesson.
An infinitely expanding economy on a finite planet is a mathematical impossibly. Therefore the problem becomes "How many doublings of the economy are enough? " Because any constantly growing function will have a doubling time. If this is not clear to you, may I recommend Professor Bartlett's excellent youtube video on exponential growth and it's inevitable consequences.
The only satisfactory solution to a problem of infinities are other infinities. I won't insult your intelligence by spelling out the obvious conclusion. The results are so clear and so improbable that the only way to convince you will be to allow you to find them for yourself.
And it requires no redistribution of whatever passes for wealth on this poor benighted planet at this moment in time.

WeeWally wiz99doz 20 Jul 2015 04:29

Capitalism finished a long time ago; if it ever existed. The use of capitalism as a synonym for greedy business is a sad commentary on the lack of language of our day. Capitalism is about capital formation and nothing to do with the ripping off of the masses. That's the role of religions and politicians who encourage everyone to work harder and accept their lot.
Capitalism is an idea born out of Protestantism. If I forgo pleasure today I will have more resources and therefore I can have more pleasure tomorrow.
Business is a simple matter. Find something you love to do and help as many people as possible. They will then throw money at you. Today's businesses, particularly financially based businesses and miners, do not seem to understand this principle and are hell-bent on destroying society and the planet so that they can be the richest survivors. They become rich, briefly in most cases, but never wealthy. Wealthy people do not spend their lives accumulating the riches of the world at the expense of others and there is never enough for the rich but non-wealthy. e.g. How much money does a man need to have before he shows his mother or father, "What a good boy am I?" Wealthy people share their wealth uplifting others and making themselves happy through their good hearts.
No country that has raised itself from under-developed to developed country status, has done so without the exploitatuion of others. We are seeing this process copied once again in Russia, India and China. India is the most disappointing because their peoples claim to understand norality. Accumulation of capital in developing countries is chiefly through corruption which is why The Party turned a blind eye to it for so long. Now that most of the Princeling families are rich they will prevent others following their methods. It's also a great way to get rid of rivals.
Britains think that the Industrial Revolution made them rich but the capital was obtained through slave trading and narcotic sales. The Yanks are so stupid they believe that their revolution was about taxes and not ripping off Native Lands. Capital was further acumulated by the Robber Barons. Australians similarly stole the land and the Chinese have stolen from their own people and now everyone else who is naive enough to trust them. Russia developed at the expense of desperate and innocent workers who gave up their share certificates to devouring oligarchs.
Britain refinanced the world by buying supplies from the Carpetbaggers and ending the Depression in the US. At the end of the war the US had the only factories still standing so used its financial power to enslave much of the world and create two empires: Their own and Stalin's. Britain has only recently escaped its clutches which makes one wonder how it got conned into Middle Eastern adventures. The US has more standing armies than Rome ever dreamed of but has sold its soul to the Chinese for a few pieces of silver. Coincidently the UK also sold out to the Chinese for silver in exchange for opium. The recovery of Hong Kong by the Party had nothing to do with land and was all about silver and face.
Long live capitalism; the real kind.

Steve Craton 20 Jul 2015 04:26

I just graduated with my BA ARCH and B ARCH from architecture school which (mine was, anyway) a hotbed of progressiveness in the name of sustainability and the fact that somebody is going to have to figure out where and how all these humans who won't stop having babies are going to live in a future Earth that may make the movie Mad Max look like a bedtime story. I'm also a card-carrying Democrat with the occasional Libertarian tendencies - for example, I think banning legal firearms will be as effective as the current ban on recreational crack and heroin use, so I disagree with my gun-control pals on the issue.

All that being said; there's never been true capitalism - or true communism or socialism, for that matter. What's bandied about as the "free market" by so-called pundits (usually on a global corporation's payroll) is more the machinations of a bunch of international Zaibatsu. I'm formerly military who went to school after service and did a stint in the private sector, viz, I'm not a starry-eyed kid anymore - but I decided that not only will I use my education and skills to do the kind of small economy things the author discusses, I will also pull a reverse John Gault and let the sociopathic corporations do their thing without me.

Jim Ballard Jim Ballard 20 Jul 2015 03:17

[ conclusion ]...

"Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self."

There was no linear path in Shakespeare's time. Economic or otherwise. Play houses themselves, not withstanding the fact that many of them burned down (there were only two left at the time Shakespeare's death), the Puritans soon reared their ugly heads and virtually put an end to the play up until the 18th century.

...Breaking down 20th century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity, and the self ?

Such a cavalier ambiguity...a grab-bag of word salad, and to what end ?

The demolition of "self" has been apparent, long before "data" collection. The death of "self" was both a political and cultural instrument; economic dynamics becomes a moot point without equal access to education. Groupthink becomes the chief hallmark of social media. The politically correct trumping social discourse. Anonymity enabled by a blind machine, trumping "self" responsibility, thus negating "self" altogether, assigning "self" to history. There will be no "self".

A dystopian trend that is probably irreversible at this point.

"...where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating."

"Bullshit jops" have been around a very long time. It remains to be seen whether technology will eliminate them, or create more of them.

" But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?"

H.G. Wells was about a century ahead of this "prediction", and he did not weight his novel with a favorable outcome...

"We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it."

Yes, with all due diligence and nothing less than serious species introspection.

Failing that, we are inviting not "utopia", but retro-Orwell and all related kin.

Jim Ballard 20 Jul 2015 03:06

Header :

"The end of capitalism has begun"

Long overdue. But technology lending equal access to prosperity for all on the horizon ? Think again.

This article is loaded with wishful thinking and non sequiturs.

"...capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being"

Not quite human, I'm afraid.

"First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages."

Yes it has. I for one preached the mantra of "Less work, more money !" back in the late 80s. But there will be a price to pay by someone else. Always.

"Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant..."

Yes. Products that really are scarce are being cheapened further by a transient collective of shallow speculators who really do not understand the product. That will change when "quick sale" solutions are made foolish. This is really nothing new. Just more prevalent.

"Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production:...The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue."

...But "information" does not equal "knowledge", and any attempt to assign the same power strategies to both is premature and silly. "Wiki" still has a very long path to "knowledge".

"New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself."

I'm concerned less what it means to "capitalism" that I am concerned with the eager constraints on both the human imagination and the displacement of the individual.

"(2008 crash) produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart."

No. The '29 Depression lasted much longer...Up until the war, in fact. A "coincidence" not unnoticed by all.

"...the retirement age is being hiked to 70...Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold."

There is only one reason "retirement" is being hiked to "70". Trillions of tax dollars are being dumped into the war machine. The government is slowing weaning itself off its obligations to both SS and infrastructure for that one fact alone. Period.

"Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet."

A little hyperbole can go a long way I suppose, but doesn't address all the reasons for price deflation while the dollar remains severely inflated.

"Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world."

Yes. We are broken.

"The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them"

This article would be more coherent if there was less word salad :

"Intellectual"..."knowledge"..."data"..."information"..."imagination"...all mixed, conjoined, exchanged...trumping any reference to real definition. Typical econo-speak.

"This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs"

How far do we take "decarbonizing ? Effects of climate change notwithstanding, silicon based intelligence(s) will soon recognize that carbon-based humans are toxic in themselves, and the utilization of such "wasted" matter and energy can serve a better end by furthering the survival of silicon-based new species.

climbertrev1 Chris Ogle 20 Jul 2015 02:37

Sorry Chris but you sound just like me...circa 1972. You have a very optimistic positive view of humanity. Unfortunately experience tends to undermine that idealism over the years. The lesson I learnt from involvement in helping run a food coop is that most people just want to obtain a service from the efforts of others. As time went on it simply became harder to find volunteers to go to the then functioning Spitalfields, which back then was still a wholesale vegetable market. This was helped by the fact that you needed to get up very very early about 3 am.
The other problem was expertise and competence. Some people were prepared to volunteer but then made some very bad decisions like buying 100 kg of brussel sprouts because they were on special. They forgot that in a food coop of 100 people not every one liked sprouts and were not going to buy 1kg of sprouts per person.
The other problem which probably killed the coop was the fact that it's members did not remain loyal. Once their original investment of 5 pounds had become a distant memory many would buy from the competing local street markets. They pointed out rightly in some cases that you could obtain cheaper better quality products down the road.

Angelo GG 20 Jul 2015 00:39

Post-capitalism, State Capitalism, Kleptocracy, Corporotocracy....
All different words describing the same thing: a bastardization of the concept of 'capitalism' whereby dictators/tyrants take-over a system of government in order to transfer power from the many to the few.
It doesn't matter how many fancy economic models and theories are put forward. There is only one reality in which the powers at be ARE NOT interested in creating world prosperity, improving standards of living and finding peace etc etc....
All of that is smokescreen - the real goal is chaos, disease, injustice and servitude for the masses.
A good article covering all of the above is here:http://georgui.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-disfigured-past-and-ominous-future.html

Go_West 19 Jul 2015 23:50

Mr. Mason offers some interesting observations in this article; indeed, if history teaches us anything it's that 'change (truly) is the only constant'. As is any argument which positions itself relative to the worst attributes of its adversary, however, Mason seems to deliberately negate the many obvious benefits afforded by Capitalism to untold millions. For all its faults, Capitalism - like Democracy - can be said to be the worst possible system until compared to the alternatives. If nothing else, Capitalism provides as fair & level a playing field as human nature will apparently tolerate; while it offers no guaranteed 'outcomes', it is a mechanism which rewards one for their contribution to society. Hard work, innovation and an affinity with what the market (i.e., other people) actually want have lifted many from otherwise systemic poverty. Frankly, it seems a disingenuous and spurious argument to connect homosexual marriage and contraception (e.g., abortion) with the elimination of poverty. Surely society's 'evolution' inevitably implies consequences which are not necessarily positive, certainly not on all counts.

So riddle me this Mr. Mason: who will carry the burden of your so-called Utopia? What will be the (un)intended consequences of the freedoms you espouse? A cursory survey of humanity's experiment with trade during these past ~3,000 years suggests that when everyone is rewarded equally, regardless of their contribution to society, the outcome is that we're all actually poorer. Life isn't fair, be it on the ancient Serengeti or contemporary Shanghai. But Capitalism - like Democracy - places at least a few cards in our otherwise empty hands.

The alternative?
'Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!'
- Karl Marx

Guardmot 19 Jul 2015 22:20

Let me begin by stating that I find much of what the writer says to be fascinating, and I will read this book. However based on this article, I find much of the analysis to be flawed.

I have been an activist on the left for many years. I think his observation that since the end of the cold war, the left has resorted exclusively to "opposing things" is profoundly inaccurate and evidence that this writer is out of touch with real social movements on the left. The drive for free universal healthcare, gender and racial equality, and a living wage for all workers belies this assertion.

But the most serious mistake the writer appears to make lies within his premise that we are now suddenly in a post-capitalist era. To put forward such an assertion, one must presume that global capitalism has been so fundamentally undermined that it can no longer sustain itself as the economic driver shaping nearly every human activity. This is plainly false and will likely continue to be false for many decades into the future. Cooperative enterprises do exist, of course, but represent less than 1% of business commerce. There is nothing new about the notion of worker coops. The utopian socialist Robert Owen created the first experiment in the early 1800s.

It can be hoped that worker owned coops will spread and that these types of enterprises will capture a greater share of the market, but they are still essentially market driven (albeit more egalitarian). I am actually optimistic that this will happen because like the writer appears to recognize, we are now in an advanced stage of capitalism and one in which the traditional hierarchies are crumbling. Like early forms of capitalism emerged within the feudal economies, I believe we are now witnessing the early stages of democratic socialism emerging from capitalism. Exactly how this social transformation will be completed is unclear.

Additionally troubling about the writers perspective is the way in which he sees the new information technologies as the great liberator of humankind. We have heard this sort of talk before. It most often gets promulgated by the CEOs in high tech industry who only by coincidence, stand to gain financially from the mythology.

This writer appears to want desperately to convince us that information technology will level the playing field for humanity and make society more just and equitable. Like a carpenter who believes his hammer makes him a good carpenter, this writer imbues information technology with a power it does not possess. Information technology is a tool, and like any tool it can be used as an instrument for good or for evil. This perspective also ignores the reality of the vast digital divide. The fact is, most of the people of the earth are simply shut out of this great information technology "revolution."

Because of this perspective, the author appears to dismiss the most fundamental reason capitalism cannot survive. This characteristic within capitalism is central to understanding Marx. Like every human society preceding it, capitalism creates internal contradictions based on class, which must necessarily lead to its demise. This fundamental dynamic is pervasive in the global capitalist system. That is why referring to social transformation as utopian, is so onerous. But this gets muddled and skewed in the author's analysis.

Finally, there are those who present a compelling argument for how information technologies in the future may create mass dislocations of workers. The rapid advances in A.I. and robotics can eliminate millions of jobs (including non-menial jobs). This could have frightening social consequences. Thus, rather than liberating, the uses of information technology to maximize profit could be enslaving for millions. It will require human solutions not entertained within our capitalist society before. Information technology may be an aid in finding these solutions. That remains to be seen.

alturium Teweldemedhin Aberra 19 Jul 2015 22:16

There is a lot of net energy out there, but our current civilization is based on a surplus energy equation using fossil fuels. In other words, it is based on cheap energy.

As the cost to extract fossil fuels goes up (as it has the last 15 years), the remaining difference is not enough to support a modern industrial society.

One of the effects of this is the reduction of wages. The traditional economists postulates that raising extraction costs get propagated as higher prices and the system accommodates. The reality is that deflation occurs because people can no longer afford the higher energy price. To stay economical (that is, be profitable), something gets crowded out and that has been wages. Declining wages.

Smarter people such as Gail Tverberg and Nicole Foss have written about this. But the problem is affordability and thus we have less demand. And collapsing commodity prices such as iron, copper, etc.

IlCarbonetto 19 Jul 2015 21:15

Postcapitalism, or The Rise of the People of Middle Earth.

You can't see them, but you can ear them digging the network of tunnels under the citadel of power (of value creation) that eventually will collapse the city walls and come to life in the day light. Well, except that I'm not convinced that the elements Paul Mason is putting on the table are sufficient to push society over the threshold of class formation, of a new hegemonic class based on an alternative way of production, of value creation. The intuition is there, and I'm prepared to suspend judgment till I read the all book. In the meantime:

1) It seems to me that in history, the 'dominated' classes never managed to acquire a sustanable level of control to implement a radical change of the system. The serfs did not overcome the aristocracy; what toppled it was the ascent of a radically new class, the merchant/capitalist, brought about by linear cumulative changes that reached at a certain point a critical level or threshold. The Russian Revolution did not bring about the hegemony of the working class, but merely an alternative state capitalistic class of burocrats. So, no system change there, I'm afraid; which is the deep reason behind that failed revolution.

2) In order to start up and curry on real radical social and economic change, it seems that the political struggle between the dominant and the dominated classes is almost irrelevant. What changes history, economic systems and social order is something more profound, cumulative, and very much 'out of control', unplannable: class formation, that is, the formation of a new 'third excluded' social class, brought about usually by demographic, technological and other changes in the ways of production, that gradually transforms the economic system, the modes of production, the creation of value, engendering a completely new (previously not existent) class with the hegemonic clout and power to substitute the previous dominant class and reshaping the relations with the dominated classes.

3) The Gramscian 'classi subalterne' do not do radical change nor lasting revolutions. They cannot topple the dominant class, nor can create a new way of production from scratch. I think Marx went against his own analysis and, by introducing platonistic elements, hoped that social and political struggle would have eventually created a new way of production and social relations; even according to his analysis, in this fundamental aspect of his tought, he got this story upside down: it is the economy, stupid!

4) So, yes, Paul Mason is, according to my watch, on something interesting, but the mix, the cocktail elements he has presented so far are not original and are not promising. Lets see...

SuperfluousMan alturium 19 Jul 2015 20:58

What happens when the automated robots can build masses of cheap wind warms and other renewables, and that energy is then converted into the factories which then make more machines which then make more renewables - all only involving a minimal amount of humans. Not only will the robots create the energy sources - but they will also clean after us, take away our old products, recycle every last bit of the product - then build the new version of the new product.

Already people who enjoy a western lifestyle have stopped having children - access to family planning and a good standard of living means we choose leisure over procreation. I read that they reckon we will reach peak-humans by about 2050, at which point the population of 10 billion will start leisuring itself slowly out of existence... then there will be more and more robots for less and less of us.

SuperfluousMan 19 Jul 2015 20:51

The capitalist system is not fighting with the sharing economy - no free market economist wants to shut down Wikipedia because it doesn't generate profit. I am very much pro capitalism and I'm very much pro Wikipedia - I am also pro being able to watch thousands of hours of lectures from the likes of Harvard University on Youtube. The fact that Google make a tiny profit from the data I produce whilst educating myself for free does not bother me at all. It seems to elude some people though that the primary driver for the social good that is free educational videos on Youtube is profit (Youtube was created for profit, it was sold to Google for a huge profit) - and there's nothing wrong with making profit.

I think the author is right about a few things, like how our economy will move towards smaller and smaller margins as competition and technology drives ever more efficient production lines, leading to more and more abundance of everyday goods - but it is capitalism that is driving these efficiency gains, not some form of neo-Marxism...

Jonathan Evans 19 Jul 2015 20:49

Progress in the Developing World

Dinner-Jackets and Pearl-Dresses, light reflecting off the marble foyer still wet from the efforts to remove signs of the city environment.
The sight of the harbour, flowing black and red; least from the dark of the night.
A still moment is caught, a fusion of language and laughter floats across air thick with humidity and human exhaust.
Now, no longer the sign of the practised thought of elders and 5000 years.
No longer time to wait for the young to grow, only time for the old to watch the immature to take all before their time.

Glass and steel, clad in stone and fibre, constructions for today built by men on bamboo.
By tomorrow the businesses will have come and gone, save for the 13th floor where they will never show.
A bear bleeds from the ring in his nose, the one-legged man chained to him in the dirt by the road.
In air-conditioned leather seats, they glide passed.
The perfect black shine drawing the heat of the sun, the bleached-white papers he reads not telling of the failings of the business he leads.

Fields of corn grow evermore golden. Cows gather together and reach the gate before the sun. And on the hill-side farm the sheep run shorn.
And while the ships and trucks bring in the profits from afar for the few, the fields are flooded, the rivers run white, and the smell of the briar fire is damp and retched, stoked with the profitless natural fibres.
What now for the designs of the future, the useless monuments reaching for a sky no longer able to sustain a view?
Buildings built for the purpose of ego, unable to be employed, burning power from unsustainable resource.
Jan 2005

alturium 19 Jul 2015 20:23

It’s hard to see the walls of the bubble when you are inside the bubble…

We talk as if we have a society that reduces work by the increase of information technology. That the direction of progress points to a heavily automated society where no one works and the biggest social issue is the fair distribution of the fruits of mechanical labor.

The virtual reality has become far removed the physical reality. The physical reality is the limitation of the resources that can grow, sustain, or maintain our lifestyle. There are limits to growth and we live in a world of diminishing returns.

We are living in one of the greatest bubbles of all times, the Great Industrial Bubble economy based on cheap fossil energy and cheap debt. Actually, there are many little bubbles such as the Finanicialization bubble since 1980, but the Great Industrial Bubble is the big one. I rank the bubbles by size: Industrial, Cheap Debt (since WWII), and Financialization.

Two hundred years ago about 95% of us would have been farmers. Today that is less than 5%. Is that because of our liberal democracies? No. Is that because of capitalism? Not really. The real basis for our complex societies is cheap fossil fuels.

Our society builds complexity based on the leftover energy surplus of cheap fossil fuels. We have jobs that are far less menial and far less physical thanks to this one-time gift. Our economy fits within the natural world, not the other way around.

When Mason says,
“Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.”

He is deluded. It is a delusion that increasing automation (read: complexity) can be supported without an increase of energy. He doesn’t understand entropy or the 2nd of Thermodynamics. The illusion of automation is concealing the fact that our economy is based on cheap energy.

It appears that you can copy music track and play it for “free”. But the reality is that a lot of energy went into building your iPhone. Cheap coal and cheap labor in China built that iPhone so that you could listen to that music track. It is not free.

Conventional oil peaked in 2005. Well, okay, effectively plateaued. We’ll probably see the ultimate peak this year. We haven’t reached peak debt…yet. What happens when we reach peak energy and peak debt? What happens when we reach Peak Everything?

I really don’t know. But the past growth and collapse of so many civilizations that overshot their ecological foundations is not comforting. We are headed for big trouble.

Desmond Lyons 19 Jul 2015 18:56

This article is such a load of crap, technology? Really? That's the answer to the most exploitative and oppressive economic system ever created?, it is not. Listen information may want to be free, but basic human necessities like food, fuel and water do not. They represent the surplus produced solely by the peasant and working classes of the world. A massive mobilization and political movement led by these classes, whom form the majority of the worlds population, is the only way to end capitalism. In the 2011 overthrow of despot Josni Mubarak, it was not twitter or Facebook who ultlmately forced him to flee the country, it was the working class army refusing to fire on protesters and independent trade unions who seized police stock piles of weapons. Climate change is already bringing the glaring contradictions of capitalism to light and the development of new technologies to spread information while somewhat useful to these struggles, will ultimately be inconsequential. Lastly co-ops will not slowly but surely replace capitalism and create a post capitalist economy, the rise of capitalism was born out of blood from the 16th century to the 20th, violent revolutions and civil wars predicate the arrival of capitalism everywhere it has gone, it will not go without a fight. It will not allow for co-ops and collectives to replace centuries of theft, exploitation and accumulation peacefully. If these positive and progressive collectives hope to survive, they must win the consciousness of the working class, engage in grass roots democracy and ultimately prepare for democratic self defense of the collective economy. A basic understating of capitalist history shows us the necessity for this, or the possibility of these endeavors being brutally and swiftly smashed by the capitalist state.

permaguy Gabriel Newlee 19 Jul 2015 18:26

I like to think the truth of where we are going can be found somewhere behind Rifkin and someone like Jaron Lanier. At least Rifkin concedes his thesis is by no means inevitable. One of the problems not addressed by any of these thinkers, is that AI is progressing faster than neuroscience itself (see the recent failures of the Human Brain Project). This creates problems being that we will create intelligent machines before we fully understand our own intelligence and consciousness. What happened to the precautionary principle. Such arrogance is not a good sign. Another issue is that Moore's law is providing an excuse for Silicon Valley companies to design for planned obsolescence, but the growth of technology to the "point its waste products disrupt the natural feedback mechanisms that control the climate" is not obviously a good path forward for humanity. Machine automation is likely only to benefit those in the West, until it very well does bring down neoliberalism. And then what...? We think we can bring this tech to everyone in the world and live happier ever after? I'm doubtful of that. Fossil fuels are running out, and those in the future will likely we spending most of their time in the fields growing food for survival.

Rex Newborn 19 Jul 2015 16:50

Every living organism on earth, including humans, competes with others of its kind, and against forces in its environment for survival. Humans have the ability to modify nature to some extent, but can they ever really control it, especially their own nature? Capitalism has been in existence since the first IOU was created, and will continue in some form unless there is a quantum leap in the evolution of human nature. Capitalism is the essence of human competition, as territoriality is among mammals.
Equality does not exist in nature. The only way that humans could ever possibly be anything approaching equal would be for all humans to be alike and to think alike. Mass cooperation among humans only happens in dire emergencies, such as wars, riots, epidemics, natural disasters, etc.; or, by force from some form of heavy-handed leadership, mass political indoctrination, forced religious adherence, marshal law, etc.
Overpopulation threatens a dire emergency on a global scale. If we are to have a redistribution of wealth and an environment where umpteen billion of us can survive, we will probably have to have a socialist government. A dictatorial, tyrannical, socialist, world government that ruthlessly forces everyone to share equally, at least as long as there is anything to share. Those that rank higher in this government, possibly the top 1%, can expect to be a lot more equal than the plebeians, of course. Those in the top 5% of government can expect to be somewhat more equal, and so on.

ID3334668 Frazer Macfarlane 19 Jul 2015 16:41

I think my comment has caused confusion in that I don't propose that there is no role for government. Indeed pots of money to fund military or academic research has been paramount to progress. But to think that these sectors are not governed by competition is misguided. Military research is at it's core a form of competition between nations while academia is rife with competition, competition for grants, publication and academic positions. My point is that the trajectory of our current system is part of it's natural evolution under constantly changing selection pressures. In science atleast, the benefits of open data and science are borne out of the realisation that such practices not only facilitate faster progress for the whole field but also strengthen reliability and reproducibility of results by increasing transparency. And it has emerged from within. This sort of thinking is also finding support in business. Therefore, while one may have intellectual property over their work, it does not preclude them deciding to share information freely with potential benefits for themselves arising from others sharing theirs. I don't see how this contradicts capitalist notions.

As for the comment above, I really don't see how we are anywhere near fully automated production and lack of potential employment. If anything the potential value of individual creativity and ingenuity is increasing. As for the example of the music industry (comment above) in many ways the proliferation of piracy, while a pain to the established music industry is leading to an increase in the importance of live performance as revenue for artists, what was most important prior to recording technologies. Technological progress has also allowed greater number and diversity of artists to find a route to market. So what I am trying to say is that it is impossible to predict how the system is going to respond but that it is constantly responding, and as I see it is organically responding through increasingly more democratized access to the market and production. If Mason can't see where this going it doesn't mean that he has found the edges of capitalism. It's just a fact that change is constantly happening, bit by bit without us even realising. That's evolution.

Ultimately, I think we may be arguing about semantics here, ie a rigid adherance to century old definitions of political ideologies which are probably unhelpful in the modern world. I still believe that the principles of competition and selection underlying all other natural system and in my view, the most important features of capitalism, will continue to be the driving forces of economic and social change. I guess this is my main point. To me capitalism is all about change (although you are free to argue that I am misusing the terminology), so I don't understand why now that change is happening, Mason wants to call it something else.

Lawrie Griffith 19 Jul 2015 15:41

It seems to me there is one important factor that has been overlooked in this article. The link between economic growth and population growth.
Current economics appears to be sustained by growth. Growth in consumption, growth in money, growth in debt, growth in productivity by lowering wages and living standards, growth through speculation, growth in asset inflation. It's a long list.
This is all underpinned by growth in population.
But in many regions of the world this is slowing, or has even stopped. For now migration from poorer countries to these regions is maintaining growth and demand, along with cheap labour.
However, advances in education and local access to knowledge through modern communication is working in tandem with increased health to empower women. This reduces birth rates, as having fewer children becomes a better form of security and opportunity than having large families, because more women are able to regulate their own fertility.
Continued growth through post-capitalist information wealth, which expands in cyberspace, is a pathway forward as the author suggests. However, neoliberal capitalism requires steady growth in consumer spending to maintain stability.
As population growth slows old style capitalism will come under strain.
The knee-jerk response is to impose Austerity on the main population to maintain the growth in wealth flows to those at the top. Everything we see in the world today suggests that the big institutions of the finance sector will will do everything in their power to maintain capital and liquidity churn and flows in the money markets.
As population growth slows and environmental change undermines economies and wages fall, the bottom, as they say, will drop out of the neoliberal consumer market.
So I ask: is the author suggesting that the rapid expansion of non-comodified, free, networked information can replace the coming stagnation in consumer demand, which is transacted in money? I like the idea, but if so: how?

Elinor Hurst ABCgdn 19 Jul 2015 15:26

40 years ago the Limits to Growth study was published, based on a systems dynamics model of the world's population, economic production, resources and pollution, and how they would interact. It forecast the sort of trouble we are now seeing, and its "business-as-usual" scenario predicted system collapse in the mid-21st Century. Governments and society leaders should have taken note back then, but they didn't, and their behaviour shows how poorly "capitalism" does rise to the challenge of global problems - it obfuscates, it denies, it defers, and it goes on doing its own thing regardless in the face of all evidence that it is on a path to destruction. Now we are left with a world that is consuming the equivalent of one and a half planets a year, and still, many are in denial.

Those of you who have infinite faith in technology and capitalism's ingenuity to save us don't get it - the scale of the problem is just getting too big, and the amount of time, effort and resources needed to be thrown at it in the time needed to prevent runaway climate change and ecosystem collapse is too short to let entrepreneurial tinkerings meander their way along to bit by bit solutions.

shininhstars122 19 Jul 2015 15:25

A very compelling piece, which I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated, but I will only add two simple conjectures...human nature and the ego.

Regardless of the social and economic systems that we continually have pat ourselves on the back for over through out time, we basically make the same crappy choices both made by those in power and by those who " claim" to be powerless.

We continually squander our full potential to become complacent once our basic " needs" are met.

We are a species that is continually self serving and if anything technology has enabled that to levels never experienced in human history and I am a glass half full guy too.

Until humanity embraces true to service to all others first before his or her own self all this discussion is an exercise in futility or at the very least denial of the true impact of our existence today.

Technology is simply the latest tool just as the spear was 10,000 years ago it does not change human nature nor is it intended to...it is merely created for survival.

There is a big difference between just surviving and truly living with our true potential.

Capitalism is a system that crates passivity and complacency and is an inherently wasteful system but hey you can't argue with 500 years of " best practices."

shininhstars122 impartial12 19 Jul 2015 15:09

That is an interesting analogy and as I think many of us would agree it is based on a flawed belief system, which has been part of human nature for eons one that we " need" someone in power to control our destiny or take care of us.

Is it genetic or a conditioned learned response from survival of the fittest existence?

Or is it simply ego?

Technology today has not helped redefine human nature or evolved the ego nor will the shared economy will. If anything it has worsen and expedited our decline as we have become over saturated with consumer driven useless information and desensitized to the many moral and ethical crisis' our species faces daily.

That being said I totally agree with your premise about your points.

I think a gross mistake, not explored in this piece, is that human nature in not inherently good as history has continued to painfully demonstrate. We have seen, even more so today, that the powerless, in as much as the powerful, choose daily actions that are composed with violence, oppression, and death.

The internet troll has blossomed because of this fact alone.

These very same actions both thought and acted out that would not seem out of place in The Middle Ages.

Capitalism is the biggest enabler for that for sure but can humanity really do what it must to change?

Remember we all hate change.

We need a new Renaissance period based on the expansion of human consciousness, one which is challenges all of our belief systems about our place in the world or rather ask the questions why we do not have a place?

The thing is with all the " new" free time we all have thanks to technology ...well we all know we squander it folks.

We all need a collective wake up call but what will it be?

We must decided if we are a specie of free will and one that wants to seeks a greater potential or simply an evolutionary hiccup that only wants to survive?

I for one are for the former.

Elinor Hurst SteB1 19 Jul 2015 14:58

I agree, SteB1; you have summed up very well the nub of the problem. But there are glimmerings of awareness seeping through the zeitgeist that things are pretty damned serious, it's just that people are confused about the best way to address them. The paradigm of endless growth, materialism, and of human godlike dominion over the planet is very ingrained, and attractive to many.

At least I think that Mason's vision has some hope of being ecologically sustainable, because it's based on a model of collaboration and networking rather than hierarchy and hence would invigorate community feeling and concern for aspects of life other than just acquiring stuff and status anxiety. We desperately need a positive vision to inspire people rather than messages of doom and gloom which tend to produce anxiety, shut down rational thought and cause retreat into conservatism and denial. And capitalism has shown itself to be very resistant in the long term to attempts to make it more egalitarian and respectful of the planet. I think Mason's ideas are definitely worth exploring, while not letting up on the insistent message that we do have an environmental crisis on our hands, the addressing of which needs to be foremost in any economic solutions.

TheGreekObserver 19 Jul 2015 14:31

Thank you Mr. Mason, for this deeply thought-provoking article. It is very refreshing to see influential voices like your own attempting to imagine what lies ahead of us, and how we will transition from the exploitative system of market capitalism in place today to a freer, better world.

However, although the piece is somehwat utopian by nature, the fact that the opposing forces to the transition discussed - namely, the governments and elites of our time - are just assumed to be willing to not only cede power, but to help facilitate this transition through designing the framework within which it will manifest, makes the piece thoroughly utopian.

As is indeed mentioned, the corporations of our time are very keen on hoarding information, while governments are only interested in being able to access this information. In both cases, access of information to the public is not given, and for good reason. An educated populace is the most dangerous thing for a government. Indeed, plans are already in the works for controlling and restricting access to the internet for the general public (SOPA/PIPA might ring a bell).

It is left to the reader to imagine how and why the powers that be would want to completely capitulate in their current agenda and instead be champions of the transition that takes power away from them. It seems highly illogical that this would be the case.

Frazer Macfarlane ID3334668 19 Jul 2015 14:27

The information technology we have is not the result of capitalism alone - much of the work which has resulted in what we have today was done by people working in state institutions such as universities, government research labs and militaries. Many more were developed with goverment grants. Steven Johnson's Where Ideas Come From has the granular detail, if you're interested.

As for restrictions on collaboration and social responsibility within liberalism - intellectual property laws, intense competition among workers and companies, the need to satisfy outrageous demands for high profits - all these are negative effects from the market.

And evolutionary mechanisms; having a 'blind watchmaker' designing your society seems like a poor cousin to rational decision making by careful, knowledgeable, empathetic people - although I agree, generally people do know what is best for themselves.

Martyn Wilson ID3334668 19 Jul 2015 14:11

I think you're missing the point, entirely. For starters, what the original piece is stating is that the basis for a new system will come (is coming) from within the existing capitalist system. Whilst the networks of which he speaks unarguably benefit the workflow and information distribution in capitalist constructs, such as the modern office space, they are also Capitalism's inevitable downfall: Take the contemporary car factory, or agriculture - the need for work (on a human level) is diminished hugely from previous levels. The level of automation by near-perfect information networks will only ever increase with further innovations, thus leading to a society with a greatly reduced need to work. Herein lies the problem for Capitalism because, surely, the jobs which people need to hold in order to pay for things simply won't exist.

The emphasis of human "work" is moving with unstoppable momentum towards the Intellectual Property side, or creativity and individualism. The role of the individual in the new system is not diminished but made more vital, for it is the individual that provides new innovation. The critical difference is that these creative individuals are working towards goals that don't support capitalist ideals; look at the music "industry", where the vast majority of participants create their intellectual property and gain no compensation for its use. They do not stop creating it! That is the human condition - although there is no financial compensation for musical ideas, people still create and innovate. I don't expect that musicians have a monopoly on this way of life and as the need for work decreases more creative people from more industries will begin to create products with no financial value. His argument is that the digital age renders Capitalism unsustainable in the very long term, not that the free market hasn't enabled innovation and vast human progress, historically. His description of "Post-Capitalism" and it's inevitable fight against free and abundant information holds water as well. Simply look at internet regulation in the U.S and U.K and take note of the increasingly restrictive internet guidelines that governments try to impose. Now, take a look at the rise of piracy and of free and instant information distribution and tell me which side will prevail - the establishment, who have failed to reduce internet piracy and freedom, or the individuals innovating within the new system?

Branko Dodig 19 Jul 2015 14:02

From my point of view, given the fact that not only productivity of work has been increasing, but also technologically there is a lot of room for it to increase further, due to overabundance of unskilled and medium-skilled labour it will depreciate in value, while very skilled labour which fuels this growth of productivity and things like real estate and resources will increase in value.

I think this trend is visible already; not just in the employment structure in the west, but also in the growth of the cost of real estate compared to wages (which is also very visible in the west at large).

I am not seeing capitalism disappearing anytime soon; technological progress leads to an economy where a relatively few workers actually produce goods, while the majority is employed doing, essentially, services. Underpinned by free trade which is the holy scripture of a good part of the 20th and 21th century, the living standard of this large majority will not, I think, significantly increase at all in the forseeable future (except for technology solving some health problems in the "civilized" world).

Of course since none of us are in possession of a crystal ball, it's all speculation. However the idea that this essentially low-tech "post-capitalist" economy which is emerging in poverty-stricken places will somehow replace capitalism and be a functioning engine of growth seems extremely far-fetched to me. It seems more of a return to older norms which have been seen in the Mediterannean during days of crisis and war before things like NGOs or the internet even existed.

Cafael Spoonface

19 Jul 2015 12:15

But taking the long view, I think there may be no neo-liberalism or even free-market capitalism; these are narratives to sweeten the reality of elites re-establishing dominance after a long period of change and of the physical expansion of industrialised society - power consolidation, after limits or barriers to that quasi-colonial expansion is reached, leading to reduced opportunity and re-emerging aristocracies.

Progress can no longer be seen as inevitable; an active political choice must be made to establish consistently humane principles. So far, attempts such as the American Constitution, the unwritten ethos of the post-war settlement and the E.U. have been successful but gradually undermined, in part because they were not sufficiently internationalist or understood by the people in terms of relevance to daily life.

Political participation and broad political education is essential; I am amazed, for example, that schools don't teach the form and history of our political system as a foundational aspect of citizenship.

It sounds hopeful that economists are questioning the assumptions of neoliberalism, but if, as I suggested, the real change is less ideological and more to do with elites preferring to be elite even if in poorly functioning economies and dysfunctional societies, these criticisms may be ignored.

Anyway, if we get Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, perhaps then we'll see! But it's up to everyone to keep making and refining the arguments, and to get them across. I think even the most indoctrinated people can change their views very quickly when they encounter good sense.

SteB1 19 Jul 2015 10:55

What I don't see from Paul Mason is any realistic evaluation of the environmental and ecological situation we face i.e. climate change and other environmental/sustainability problems. This is the whole problem with most economists i.e. they have absolutely no education or understanding of:

1) How much our present economy in any shape of model is entirely reliant on the natural environment, natural ecosystems, and how these are reliant on the current climate regime.

2) Just how much our present economic model needs to change to be ecologically sustainable.

3) Most importantly the natural environment, and natural ecosystems, what they are and how they operate.

These are hard limits, absolute reality. All those dreaming of this information revolution, just do not seem to grasp who the size of our human population, and the growing consumption of resources means that we are soon going to run into the ecological buffers. Ecosystems, are like economies, systems. We just take them for granted, but they are not always going to sustain them. If we seriously effect the running of the world's ecosystems through climate change and other environmental impacts, they simply won't function anywhere near as efficiently, and it will take them 1000s years to re-adjust and adapt. In the mean time, they will not support our economy, which is not our financial system, but the chains of supply i.e. food etc, which keep us alive.

Unless we seriously address these ecological sustainability problems and the causes of climate change, we will never get to the stage where this information revolution happens.

Sure the current model of capitalism is doomed, because it is ecologically suicidal. But other models will not happen, and it will just be a giant collapse, if we don't learn and understand what ecological sustainability really means.

It really is an absolute crisis that so few economists, or educated people generally, have any understanding of environmental and ecological reality at all. Very few educated people have a good grasp of science, very few scientists study environmental science, or scientific ecology, and very few environmental and ecological scientists study how our whole economy and lifestyle is reliant on ecosystems and the natural environment. Most environmental and ecological scientists, which is a minute proportion of all scientists, which are a minute proportion of all educated people, study parts of the natural environment, or parts of how ecosystems function, but not in a joined up way.

This is the massive crisis our culture faces. Virtually no educated people in our society study and understand what supports our whole economy and what keeps us alive. We are facing environmental and ecological suicide, and outside of a few insightful environmentalists, most cannot see the situation we face. Climate scientists talk about the impacts of climate change, and they understand the physical part, but very few have much of an understanding of ecosystems and how reliant they are on current climate regimes.

This is the crisis we face, one of a lack of understanding and joined up thinking. Hardly any educated people are looking at the part of the equation that really matters, and they are just mistakenly taking it for granted.

poplartree1 19 Jul 2015 10:24

Here is an article giving an example of the alternative economy in action, called regenerative agriculture:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/07/19/poultry-centered-regenerative-agriculture.aspx?e_cid=20150719Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20150719Z1&et_cid=DM82002&et_rid=1040881885
"Regenerating Ecology, Economy, and Social Conditions

Reginaldo's program has generated a system that has regenerative impact both on the ecology and the economy, meaning it restores the ecology that produces food, and the economic flows necessary for that food to be economically sustainable and resilient.

It also addresses the social conditions of food production in the US (and elsewhere), which is important considering the fact that farm workers are typically poorly paid immigrants.

Without sacrificing the financial, and sometimes physical, welfare of these workers, our food couldn't be as cheap as it is, so social injustice is really built into the conventional system.

“So far, we have developed three prototype proof-of-concept units. One is a research and development (R&D) farm, one is a training farm, and the third one is more of a production farm. It’s poultry centered, but it’s integrated with over 14 enterprise sectors.

Once you take the poultry and you start producing either eggs or meat, you immediately integrate the production of feeds. That’s another enterprise sector. Once you start producing feed, you realize you need grains, so there’s that other enterprise sector—farmers producing grains, money turning over and over, creating resilient (shock resistant) wealth.

If you are going to produce grains, that can also be done under a regenerative framework. The whole blueprint is regenerative. Under our blueprint, a grain farmer is not going to produce only corn and soybeans. In fact, we may not even produce soybeans because they are not good for chickens.

But more than that, under our poultry centered system framework, you start looking into perennial grain and small grain. Following that, you’re not going to produce those grains as monocultures either; as a healthy egg layer or meat bird needs a diversity of small (whole) grains to deliver the foods that actually nurture us and make us healthier when we consume the eggs or meat.

That means we start restoring some of the perennial crops of a given ecology as we adapt our blueprint to a specific area. For Minnesota we are incorporating elderberries in the fields where we grow vegetables and grains, and hazelnuts inside the paddocks where we range the poultry; hazelnuts being ecologically symbiotic with chickens.

Once you start incorporating all of the different enterprise sectors, including the processing and distribution, you have a system that regenerates itself. It’s still poultry-centered and focused; yet it’s not about chickens at all. It’s about a whole set of ecological, economic and social factors that when combined, regenerate our ability to achieve a system level structure, one that can hopefully expose in real terms the futility of our currently dominant extractive, unhealthy system.”

A Novel System for Raising Chickens

While chickens do eat grass and grubs, they're primarily carnivores. They're not strictly vegetarians. Egg-laying hens in particular need a high-protein diet (about 17 percent protein food sources). That doesn't mean chickens need animal protein, however.

By setting up a system where you use sprouted grains and give your chickens access to whole small grains such as camelina, flax, oats, barley, wheat, and amaranth (not soybeans or corn), you provide them with plenty of healthy protein. By sprouting the grains, you increase not only the available protein, but also the minerals, amino acids, and digestive enzymes, which are critical for the health of the chickens’ gut flora.

“That is how we grow chickens,” Reginaldo says. “They still have ground feed, but we can select non-genetically modified feeds. In our case, focusing the diet on whole small grains, we can more easily convert our system to meet organic standards, as long as the consumers are willing to pay for that extra cost that organic feeds demand.

But overall, we have been able to bring out a whole new way of feeding the poultry and still not locking into a micro-scale. We can raise an average of 1,500 meat birds per flock, per production unit, all within half an acre of ranging paddocks that birds rotate into as they regenerate."

algefern

19 Jul 2015 08:41

Like most people, I'm a sociable individual with material needs. I wish to appropriate that which I need, and I like to share as long as I am not ordered to. I am the best steward of my own resources, whereas 'we' is a management disaster, unless a voluntary arrangement working with the same aim. A political system that says 'no, you can't be whole, you either have to surrender to the collective or be part of a hegemony based upon numbers', is quite simply inadequate, so like most I work my way through it but I don't encourage it, as I refuse to fight with myself. That isn't democracy.

Consumer capitalism worked in the post war years - a period of rapid expansion and population growth but like any other system is limited by finitude. The economic turmoil is a symptom of that as the system that attempts to make us at war with ourselves starts to collapse. Trade will always be necessary, but there won't be the level of demand, so systems that are dependent on ever-increasing growth will have to give way to sustainability, or they will die. Socialism on a massive scale does really work either, unless imposed by draconian rule, and stifles creativity. It's not rocket-science.

I hope that I may live to see the day when people have finally woken up to themselves and have abandoned the quest for the High-Quality Inflatable Number. There will be no socialism or capitalism in such a world.

Pete Piper Gearjammer

19 Jul 2015 06:27

Fractional reserve money systems can never be repayed. Macroeconomics sets government debt EXACTLY equal to private savings. That's how money is created. Growth is not possible without government debt. Too little is arguably worse than too much. Finding the right amount is hard for two reasons. 1. Banks have figured how to leverage this debt (or savings) without limit, but this is theoretically controlable. 2. Money velocity is the big unknown that can grow or collapse the system, and it depends on human psychology which isn't understood well - yet. When governments can reliably control regional emotions, I accept the possibility of fractional reserve inherent currency stability. Meaning that absent something real, like a massive epidemic or war, there won't be financial collapse.

If governments learn to control regional emotion, I wouldn't want to live with the creepiness. Presumably, they'd tune down that feeling.

Pete Piper ExtraStrength 19 Jul 2015 05:37

Government created corporations as tools to maximize profits. This one dimensional capitalism works when functioning democracy is its master. Reverse the relationship, though, and you create a big game of Monopoly. The game ends only one way, with total economic devastation.

The author is conceeding that big money has won. He is proposing creating non-threatening groups that value more than short term profits. The hope is that hundreds of experimental groups can learn from each other "under the radar". The hope is that successes will grow rapidly and become impossible to stop. Maybe like legal Marijuana has stealthily passed the economic and political threshold in the US where further growth can not be stopped even though it's still illegal under national law? Just my interpretation.

I don't share the author's optimism (about replacing capitalism). Marijuana has definitely won with a brilliant and patient strategy.

Pete Piper FredMyers992 19 Jul 2015 03:51

Control theory and economic modelling knowledge is needed to truly appreciate the complexity of optimizing resources in a modern society. Even with today's computers, dictatorial control is hopelessly inadequate. Capitalism under the control of an educated democracy CAN handle the massive information flows and optimization computations needed by a modern economy. I agree, something is broken. Maybe it's our democracy that's broken and not capitalism? Capitalism must be subordinate to society. Government created corporations as tools to optimize profit. Capitalism in the role of master ends like the game of Monopoly with total destruction.

Science is the only tool we have to understand what has gone wrong today. I'd like to see the science of macroeconomics expanded into exploring alternative societies. Understanding is not enough, though. Existing macroeconomics predicts the failure of austerity, yet our leaders and voters CHOSE to ignore its predictions. The vast information network that gives the author so much hope can not even motivate the masses of voters to accept economic science settled for decades, so I see little reason for optimism.

The network is also good for spreading propaganda. How much of the pervasive trolls are being paid? How many are sophisticated mindless chat-bot propaganda machines? It's hard for a human brain to grasp today's wealth inequality and the power imbalance it creates. In the US, our wealthiest 14 individuals are worth more than our bottom 150 MILLION COMBINED (half our population). I still have hope, but know it's not rational.

William Billingsley 19 Jul 2015 02:21

Capitalism is about your freedom of action -- neither the state nor your union boss can dictate what agreement you make with whom about trading your efforts or material. I don't see that changing in an era where trust in overbearing institutions is falling not rising. Though there's a shift, it's not post-capitalistic.

What I think we are seeing at national economic levels is a simple shift in how you regard tax and money. Where previously it was a matter of tax/spend, it will move to source/sink. Quantitative easing is becoming normalised, and at some stage we will see government spending replaced by direct quantitative easing (a basic salary but from the currency issuer, eg Bank of England, not the elected government of the day). The easing outflows and tax inflows would then be a means to control inflation and other economic variables. The state will shrink -- when you are supplied with the money, you choose which services you spend it on. We may see more Obamacare-style mandates "you must buy health/education, but from whoever you choose". Leftist debates about "ban _ in _", "increase funding for _", and "reduce funding for _" become irrelevant, as those choices are properly democratised (handed over to individuals for their spending).

The economics of labour will trickle on as they have before. People will agree how much the work is worth (but without the political complication of needing a minimum amount to pay basic living expenses). There will probably be more monopolies -- as the cost of good falls, and the quality gap between competitors falls, the economic advantage of shopping around falls. That probably means wealth inequality will remain high.

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